Christmas in Alabama...day 4

Monday December 23

Kerry and I woke up and eagerly greeted the eve of Christmas Eve.

Hooray, today the rain has finally stopped. The humidity was replaced with cooler weather and with the constant rain yesterday, there is a damp coolness in the air. Usually as the day progresses the weather is supposed to get warmer. Today the opposite happened and by late afternoon it was downright chilly. Time to layer my clothes. I was glad I brought cold weather clothing,

One of Nick's bedrooms is called the garage. Because they really don't have a lot of storage space, this bedroom has been utilized for extra storage; mostly with items one would find in a garage (shelves, tools, suitcases, and other odds and ends), Kerry and I thought that if Nick and Kristin had a storage shed, the "garage" could be converted back into a bedroom. By having an extra bedroom, visitors (like us) would have a dedicated room to use during overnight visits. A shed was one of the items on Nick and Kristin's "wish" list. Can you say, "Ho Ho Ho?"

 

For Christmas, we bought them a shed and today's agenda was all about assembly. The first phase was putting together the various parts that would eventually come together to form the basic structure. We got as far as getting the wall bases in place and screwed together. We also managed to get the main I-beam and 2 side beams assembled! thanks to Kerry and her organizational skills. She kept Nick and me on track and on schedule. Oh, and I was the first one to bleed.

 

After dinner we headed over to Bass Pro so the kids could see Santa, but when we got there,  there were hundreds of people in line ahead of us (well maybe not hundreds but you get the idea).  It would take hours to reach Santa if we stayed. Kristin immediately came up with Plan B. We will return tomorrow morning when they open and hopefully the lines will be a lot shorter.

As we settled in with kids in bed Nick started making Lefse, a holiday tradition he learned from Poppi and a tradition Nick was going keep alive and hopefully pass on to his kids some day.

For Kerry and me, it was  time to say, "Nighty night."

Every family has a story that it tells itself, that it passes on to the children and grandchildren. The story grows over the years, mutates, some parts are sharpened, others dropped, and there is often debate about what really happened. But even with these different sides of the same story, there is still agreement that this is the family story. And in the absence of other narratives, it becomes the flagpole that the family hangs its identity from.

A.M. HOMES, O Magazine, Apr. 2007